Animal rational

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Animal rationale is a Latin translation of the Greek "zoon logikon" or "zoon logon echon". With this expression, Aristotle emphasized the human ability to think as the essential human characteristic that distinguishes it from animals. The more precise understanding depends on how reason, thinking, logos, spirit, ratio and other terms are defined.

If one proceeds from the “thesis of the psycho-physical dual nature of man” and sees - like Plato - the essence of man in reason, this leads to an anthropology of reason. The assumed primacy of human animal nature, on the other hand, can lead to biologism or materialism . Such a dualism was rejected by Aristotle . Thomas Aquinas brought this perspective in connection with Aristotle to the concept that the soul is the "forma corporis".

Immanuel Kant defines man as an animal rationabile , who must first become an animal rational through the realization of his ability to reason . The human being only becomes human through upbringing and education, an enlightening view that was sometimes assigned "an almost explosive effect".

Martin Heidegger, on the other hand, criticized the definition of human beings as rational animal because it led to a "narrowing of the concept of existence" insofar as "the historicity of human existence was sacrificed in favor of a supra-historical determination of the essence, the rationality of human beings".

See also

The term is significant in philosophical anthropology .

swell

  • Aristotle's Metaphysics (English)
  • Herbert Marcuse 2001: Eros and Civilsation, page 56 in: Kory Schaff: Philosophy and the Problems of Work: A Reader, Rowman & Littlefield Publishers

literature

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Jan P. Beckmann: Anima rationale . In: Walter Kasper (Ed.): Lexicon for Theology and Church . 3. Edition. tape 1 . Herder, Freiburg im Breisgau 1993, Sp. 682 (683) .
  2. ↑ Gernot Böhme: Immanuel Kant: The education of man to be of reason , in: R. Weiland, Philosophical Anthropology. Weinheim, 1995, p. 30 (31)
  3. ↑ Martin Gessmann: Philosophical Dictionary. 23rd edition. Kröner, Stuttgart 2009: Animal rationale